Puzzle-themed holiday cards from a famous codebreaking couple
How Elizebeth & William Friedman celebrated the season.
A few years ago, when I began researching what would become The Woman Who Smashed Codes, I spent weeks poring through the personal papers of Elizebeth Friedman, the codebreaking Quaker poet and war hero. She gave 22 boxes of documents to a library before she died in 1980. The library is an amazing place — it’s part of the George Marshall Foundation in Virginia. And those 22 boxes are full of the most wondrous stuff. I felt giddy reading through it all, like I’d stumbled into one of the greatest stories I’d never heard before.
A lot of these materials speak to very serious missions. They document Elizebeth’s remarkable codebreaking career and all the high-stakes, often-secretive work she performed: catching gangsters during Prohibition, hunting Nazi spies during WWII, and on and on. But there are also plenty of documents that show what Elizebeth was like as a person — a friend, wife, mother. A scientist and a dreamer.
Elizebeth, of course, was married to a codebreaker — William Friedman, who would one day lead a team that solved Japan’s most secret crypto system during WWII. And from the first day they met, in 1916, at a bizarre private laboratory known as Riverbank, they bonded through the fun of codes and ciphers. They loved the challenge of solving puzzles and finding new methods to break whatever system seemed unbreakable. Early on, they even wrote love letters to each other in code. Later, as working intelligence professionals in D.C., they threw elaborate “Cipher Parties,” inviting guests to solve cryptograms that revealed the locations of scavenger-hunt items spread throughout the city. And when the Friedmans had children — a daughter, Barbara, and a son, John Ramsay — they included the kids in the games, too.
For instance, every December, Elizebeth and William devised a new original holiday card based on some type of puzzle. Elizebeth’s archive contains several of these cards, and they’re charming. I remember one day when I was doing research at the Marshall, I came across one of the cards, which required the paper to be folded a certain way to reveal the message. I had to stop everything until I could solve it.
Recently, two fellow Elizebeth obsessives reminded me of these cards, attaching images of them in a group email thread. Big thanks to Stuart Boersma, professor of math at Central Washington University, and Melissa Davis, Director of Library and Archives at the Marshall — both great champions of Elizebeth’s story and legacy.
Now I want to share the cards with you. They’re included at the bottom of this newsletter post.
Feel free to print these out, email them, and share with your own friends and family. All images are courtesy of the George Marshall Foundation Library.
See if you can solve them.
Elizebeth TV show TK???
One more thing before the images — I hope to have some news early next year about a possible TV show centered on Elizebeth and based on the book. I can’t say anything yet, but I’ve been working on it with some awesome creative people, and we have some momentum and a potential studio partner that’s pretty exciting. Fingers crossed. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m able.
Thanks as always to those of you who have bought or borrowed TWWSC. Please keep spreading the word about the book and Elizebeth’s story!
Onto the cards…
The full folding holiday card (year unknown):
1931:
1933:
1934:
1935:
1928:
O.K., I saved my favorite for last. I can’t resist saying something extra about this one, below. It’s called a “turning grille.” The red square at the left is perforated with circular holes. When you place the grille above the letter grid to the right, certain letters show through. But that’s not all: When you turn the grille 90 degrees, and then 90 degrees again, different letters show, and those are part of the message too. This is actually a classic pencil-and-paper code system that was widely used by spies even into WWII — as I detail in “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” Nazi agents in South America were using this same kind of turning-grille system to conceal their dispatches. Elizebeth, of course, broke their code and gave U.S. and British intelligence the ability to read the Nazi messages.
Happy holidays, and see you in the new year.
—Jason